A new essaything I have up over at the Cult. Click here to get there.

So far, too, this is getting the award (derision?) for shortest post ever.

Anyway, lost in the surf of Duma Key right now, and looking forward to snagging The Plague of Doves afterwards. Writing this novel too all the while, which I just keep expecting to self-destruct. But somehow it just keeps unfolding. And I guess that’s good, but, too, I’m about the last person in this situation who’d know, either.

Gone already. Hope the essaything stanches the flow a bit. Of bad prose, I mean. As to why it’s an ‘essaything’ and not just a ‘craft essay,’ too: it’s that I don’t write essays. A wholly foreign mode. I do, however, occasionally write something with no characters, no plot, just this monologue grappling through some idea or another. Which is what “As I Lay Mostly Dying” is. Oh, and if there’s anybody out there who doesn’t get the “lolly lolly”-bit, just click here, let the happiness wash over you.

A TG Sheppard line^*, yeah. That and Elvis’s “Kentucky Rain“^** make up a whole eight or ten month block of my . . . not childhood, but that’s when I listened to them most. ‘Life,’ I guess. Which is pretty much the complete opposite of the story just out here:

An interview and a Demon Theory review in there too. And, yep, it’s been on the shelves for a bit already, but I’m just seeing it anyway.

Man, came home Friday after watching Prom Night, just all conflicted and twitchy from it, and then the next morning woke early, slammed down an essay-thing about it, and then of course hit the wrong button, lost it all, so, when I finally had time (that night), I re-did what of it I could, and bam, now it’s up at PopMatters, one of the sites I respect the most:

Author Stephen Graham Jones looks into the disappointments of the Prom Night remake, finds pause to reflect back on the past of the slasher film and sees a glimmer of hope for the future.

Also, for the close readers (even casual — really, you can run by the screen while fighting a small dog and still catch it), there’s a thing that slips out downlow on that page. Was waiting to say it out loud until I had a very specific date to pair it up with. Now that date’s “Summer.” Ideally, it’d be “Corvette Summer,” and Mark Hamill would be involved somehow, but still, I’m happy with how it’s all going nevertheless.

Man, I got the year right for The Ruins anyway, back when. And this is another non-review, yeah. Specifically, one with spoilers. Anyway, yeah, Scott Smith pretty much proves that it’s not always a bad idea to let the author be the one to make that book-to-screen jump. He nails it, I mean. I guess there’s something to be said for knowing the material. Not here to say Good job though. Not only that anyway. Just because the end of the movie version of the The Ruins doesn’t quite work, I don’t think. Not saying a (UK-) The Descent ending would have been in order, but, c’mon: just because this is a crawling, leafy slasher, that doesn’t mean it’s not a slasher, right? Which is to say the real narrative escalation happens in the last frames: “What, Michael’s not laying there dead anymore?” Something along those lines, which suggests that what’s happened is that Michael’s scurried out of that world on-screen, has maybe found a way into ours. That’s what The Ruins needed. Says the back-seat driver, yeah. The armchair quarterback. But surely somebody must have at least suggested this, right? It just seems so obvious — and here comes the spoilage: at the end, when the Greeks finally bumble out to the these ruins to save the day, instead of just having them look up this vine-swaddled pyramid, the whole movie about to happen again, just starring them now, why not escalate, why not just keep the camera in one place as they walk across that salted earth, so that we can see these unharmless red flowers opening behind them? Watching them, tracking them. The idea, the certainty, being that Amy, our Marilyn Burns here, when she split out of there, she was inadvertently — selfishly (Spock would never do this, though, yes, 28 Weeks Later definitely would/does) — playing some hybrid of Johnny Appleseed and Typhoid Mary. Which is to say that this vine, this ancient, bloody, hungry, unstoppable vine, it’s finally, after all these years, broken through its salt-barrier, outwitted its generations of Mayan guards. And now there’s not enough salt in the world to hold it back. All that’s left is for it to take root way up the Borneo, wait for the anaconda population there to get a taste for its sticky sweet fruit. Or some could even drift out to Skull Island; it’d fit right in with the citizens there.

None of which is to say that The Ruins wasn’t just excellent. Nothing but fun. I just wish it would have taken a bit more of a chance there at the end. Oh, and I guess I wish too that having an unAmerican accent wasn’t a death sentence.

And, in other news, The Shark Is Still Working looks pretty cool. However, Zombie Strippers. that’s what I expect to sweep all the Oscars this year. I’m there opening day, anyway, be it at the theatre or on Netflix.

Who knew, yeah? Looks like it’s out loud now, anyway, here, and here, etc. And no, no clue how or if the footnotes were handled, or if, when they were or weren’t handled, it was as endnotes that they were or weren’t handled (that is, if the audio’s working off the paperback or cloth version). Was so tempted to footnote that sentence right there too^*. Anyway, maybe this is cool. Looking forward to giving it a listen.

[ edit: just listened to a bit of it — meaning Yep, it’s real — and it’s pretty cool ]

1. Just got a story, “Lonegan’s Luck,” accepted by New Genre. Like most stories if you peel them back far enough, this one, too, is a zombie western. Nearly forty pages of it.

2. Doomsday opens tomorrow. Very excited. Looks like all the elements I look for in high-calibre, life-altering cinema, they’re here. Which is to say that if Tina Turner waltzes on, starts singing, that’ll only make things twice as good. Too, cool that Rhona Mitra’s in it. She was great in The Life of David Gale (which I thought deserved four stars from Ebert, not the zero he gave it), and excellenter than ever in Highwaymen. I would remember her from Skinwalkers too, except I got to that five minutes late, couldn’t figure out what was or wasn’t happening (except that, yes, there would be wolves), so I slipped catlike into some other movie. Looks like she’s soon to be in the next installment of Underworld, too. All kinds of horror goodness. But that’s a redundant thing to say; horror is goodness.

3. My new and forever hero, his name is Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz. He’s the bad guy on Phineas & Ferb, which I’m just wholly and completely addicted to. And yeah, so Perry the Platypus takes him down pretty much every episode, but Doofenshmirtz, he’s got style. If I’m ever a bad guy in a cartoon, he’s who I’m going to be.

Specifically, The Ones That Almost Got Away: A Collection.

One more Halloween I’ll hardly be able to wait for.

Another interview, this one over at Depraved Press, with Jesse Wichterman, who asks some good questions. Mostly we just talk about politics and the climate and religion, and what role Dee Snyder could play in all of them, in a just-slightly different reality. Or even in this one. Then of course, when Snyder isn’t the best fit, we fall back on Blackie Lawless, who’s always dependable in a pinch, especially where weighty issues are concerned, but finally settle on an ideal candidate (for political leader & valiant cloud-bringer) being more along the lines of some understated hybrid of Harlan Ellison and Ted Nugent, though of course with the arms of Stallone in Over the Top.

Or, ‘cyber’ with maybe some ‘lycanthropy,’ anyway. Chocolate and peanut butter, man. Conan and Red Sonja. Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie. Or, well. All I mean is that my story “Deviants,” bam, it’s now in Red Fez 13.

So a while back, I started a list like this but it got all out of hand, yeah, turned into that House of Fiction thing, which was really just a version of this other post, I suppose. When all I really wanted was something short, to pin up by my monitor, help me keep it between the lines, all that. Except of course writing ‘rules,’ I mean, Vonnegut’s laid them down, Elmore Leonard’s done it, Twain’s got them, Palahniuk’s messed around with it, and Orwell has too, and of course Stephen King has. And then there’s stuff like this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and of course this, and I agree with just about all of it (except the bad talk about mutants; sand mutants rule), even down to stealing some of them (’incorporating’), but still, I guess, am either vain enough or blind enough — and I’m thinking vanity and blindness aren’t that unrelated, really — to think that I have to have my own list. Maybe just for me, for that little empty space by my monitor. Something like this:

1) Start as close to the end as possible.

2) Don’t get too fancy.

3) Don’t be smart.

4) Only ever tell us what we can’t already assume.

5) The main character has to be in some kind of jeopardy.

6) Always remember that your audience can walk away at any point, even while thumbing through a table of contents. Don’t let them.

7) Endings are earned, not rigged. And they need to be on the page, please.

8) Vagueness is not ambiguity. And ambiguity is often just timidness.

9) Be wary of semicolons and colons and em-dashes and ellipses and italics and all the coordinating crutches: though, but, however and the rest.

10) Be economical with your exclamation points, and with passive voice, and with any sentence that uses the ‘when/while’-construction of ‘as.’

11) Subtlety isn’t key. Precision is.

12) Your story should read like somebody with scissors went through a story three times as big, and left only the good stuff.

13) Let the story engage the reader, not the writing.

And I didn’t put “Never describe a character by having him or look in a mirror” down because, let’s face it, if you’re tempted to do that, you’re up against some sort of crisis of the soul that no list is going to be able to fix, yeah?^*

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• *And besides, sand mutants don’t have mirrors. Where they live, anything shiny draws attention.
  

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